News 24 Twitter Handle Potentially Hacked To Promote Ripple Giveaway Scam

The scam tries to lure users with a fraudulent 100,000 XRP airdrop pool.

Hackers have potentially gained access to the official Twitter account of News 24, a popular Hindi news channel.

The Crypto Basic observed that over an hour ago, the Twitter account with over 1.3 million followers was used to promote a Ripple giveaway scam. Meanwhile, at the same time, the account appears to be operating as usual, with no statement of an account breach.

🔥Is ready to massive P U M P
🌎To support crypto community, Brad Garlinghouse Ripple CEO initiated Airdrop

👉First come, first served: https://t.co/gZmbidikBI
📌Note: you can take a gift only once. Hurry up!

— News24 (@news24tvchannel) March 15, 2023

Consequently, The Crypto Basic has contacted News 24 for comment but has yet to hear back. At the same time, we have also taken active steps to report the tweet and encourage other users to do so to prevent unsuspecting users from falling victim.

Notably, the scammers in a Medium-type blog post claim that Ripple Chief Executive Officer Brad Garlinghouse is offering a 100,000,000 XRP airdrop pool for “Ripple users” as a token of appreciation for their continued support. Consequently, it directs users to a potential wallet-draining website to participate in the airdrop.

“To celebrate the global power of #XRP we are proud to announce initiating the annual airdrop pool of 100 000 000 XRP to every Ripple user,” the scammers wrote. “Nothing we do at Ripple Labs would be possible without our community, and this is just a part of our efforts to assert that.”

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Meanwhile, it would not be the first time scammers have impersonated the Ripple chief or promoted fraudulent giveaways on social media. Notably, a proliferation of these scams on YouTube led Ripple and its CEO to sue the social media platform in April 2020. Garlinghouse, at the time, questioned why social media platforms, with all their resources, failed to keep out frauds from their platforms. 

Twitter is often a popular choice for scammers who sometimes use spam bots and compromised verified accounts for their nefarious purposes. While Elon Musk promised to fix these issues after taking over the firm, some users have asserted that things have worsened.

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